Pre-teens and teens who use e-cigarettes are more likely to smoke the conventional kind, too, study shows

Updated March 6, 2014 at 12:14 PM;Posted March 6, 2014 at 11:00 AM

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A new study published today is the first to look at the association between e-cigarette use and smoking cconventional cigarettes among pre-teens and teens in the United States
(Bill Kennedy/Plain Dealer )

“We can’t say for sure that e-cigarette in adolescence leads them to smoking cigarettes, but it can lead to a nicotine addiction,” lead study author Lauren Dutra, a researcher at the Center for Tobacco Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco, told The Plain Dealer.

The study also found that cigarette smokers who had used e-cigarettes were more likely to report planning to quit smoking in the next year, but less likely to do so.

Cigarette smokers in 2011 who had ever used e-cigarettes were more likely to intend to quit smoking within the next year. However, e-cigarettes were associated with lower abstinence from cigarettes.

Dutra and her colleague, Stanton Glantz, examined survey data from children in grades 6 to 12 who completed the National Youth Tobacco Survey in 2011 and 2012.

The pencil-and-paper survey was created to provide information for national and state tobacco prevention and control programs.

What Dutra and Glantz found was that the use of electronic cigarettes by adolescents was associated with higher odds of them smoking cigarettes. The use of e-cigarettes doubled between 2011 and 2012, from 3 percent to 6 percent.

Of the 17,353 adolescents who took the survey in 2011, 3.1 percent had tried e-cigarettes at least once, and 1.1 percent were current e-cigarette users.

By 2012, when 22,529 students took the survey, 6.5 percent of them had tried e-cigarettes and 2 percent were current e-cigarette users.

The odds of children who tried e-cigarettes - and who regularly smoked them - going on to experiment with regular cigarettes grew, the researchers found.

Data from the National Youth Tobacco Survey on the increased use of e-cigarettes among youth was first released last fall in a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“The scientific evidence is now starting to pile up,” Glantz said. "This is the first study looking at the linkage of e-cigarettes and [conventional] cigarettes in the United States.”

As people wait to see whether the Food and Drug Administration announces new proposed regulations for the sale and marketing of e-cigarettes, it continues to be a hot topic of conversation, even spawning an e-cigarette etiquette survey.

Ohio's new law is not without its critics, who oppose the bill because it creates a separate category for e-cigarettes and doesn’t tax them the same as tobacco cigarettes, making them more expensive for kids to buy - or adults to buy for them.

“It’s a good idea not to sell e-cigarettes to kids,” Glantz said “But unless that’s tied to some kind of licensing and strong enforcement, simply making it illegal to sell to kids has very little effect.”

In an accompanying editorial in JAMA Pediatrics, Frank Chaloupka of the University of Illinois at Chicago wrote that “Adopting the right mix of policies will be critical to minimizing potential risks to public health while maximizing the potential benefits.

“While much remains to be learned about the public health benefits and /or consequences of [e-cigarette] use, their exponential growth in recent years, including their rapid uptake among youths, makes it clear that policy makers need to act quickly,” he wrote.